During Gamescom, EA’s Patrick Söderlund had a long chat with Game Informer and he weighed in with his thoughts on the upcoming console upgrades from Sony and Microsoft.

“We haven’t seen this whole idea of upgrading since the Mega CD in 1991 or something. At the time, that might not have worked, but this is different,” he said. “I can only comment to what’s been announced by Microsoft, the whole idea of keeping the ecosystem intact and scaleable is right. If you get in later in the cycle, you can get a Scorpio or you can upgrade to it. It’s an interesting, smart approach, and we’ll see how well it works.”

Having already seen the hardware both companies are working on, Söderlund said that he was “super excited” about the Scorpio after getting a peek at it, and, “without giving you any information, the same is true of Sony. In general, this is a good thing.”

He also addressed the possibility of working with Nintendo again.

“Nintendo is such an instrumental part of our whole industry. They deserve to be successful, and they deserve to be a major player in the business, given their pedigree. It’s not only the machines that they’ve built, but also the IPs they’ve brought to market. There are very few companies like Nintendo.

“Whenever they bring something to market that we see an addressable market for, we’ll be there. Given that they haven’t announced [a new console] officially or shown it, I can’t comment specifically.”

While Söderlund remains tight-lipped about the unannounced hardware, he seems confident that the install base will grow as a result.

Talking about the Frostbite engine and the challenges that EA may face when making decisions on “what to use the horsepower on,” he speculated that, “the notion of an Xbox ecosystem or a PlayStation ecosystem that keeps growing and gets bigger and bigger is important for us. Even if we come to a point where we’re seeing increased development costs as a result of that, hopefully the added install base is going to solve that.”

While the Scorpio has already been announced, Sony is expected to unveil the Neo at the PlayStation Meeting in New York on September 7.

Sometimes we include links to online retail stores. If you click on one and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. For more information, go here.